BY STEPHEN WOLF | Great art is the reluctant, bitter fruit reaped from great tragedy. Within hours after the first plane slammed into the North Tower, writers tried expressing our astonishment and then our horror. Together we watched the Towers fall, and unlike anything else, ever, the world watched too. In his song “Weapons of Mass Deception” Warren Dastrup, asleep in Hawaii — gets a 4 a.m. call from his Minnesota cousin: “Turn on CNN.”
After months of stunned incomprehension, despite if we were lucky enough to have not lost a loved one among the 2,728 lost there that day, we struggled even to believe that the Towers actually had collapsed; how many of us said how many times that we just can’t believe the Towers aren’t there anymore; how many of us still say it.
New Yorkers have a long history with buildings lost to time or fire or progress; with the island so narrow and no room to expand except upwards, Manhattan has often too quickly and regrettably leveled the old for the new. And though New Yorkers bemoan how the old Pennsylvania Station slipped through our clutched fingers, the loss of Tower One and Tower Two of the World Trade Center was very different than any buildings ever lost before because our images and recollections of those towers are not so much for the buildings but the people in them who died that day: those in offices who watched two jetliners smash into their faces; those on the upper floors who survived the hits but not the flames; those many, too many, below the line of impact but unable to escape; and those resisting every human instinct of survival, who entered the burning towers not to save those they love but because it was their job.
Poems and songs appeared first: smaller, crystallized moments, created quicker than novels’ several hundred pages or the elaborate tech films require. Almost immediately after that brilliantly sky-blue Tuesday morning —“severe clear” in airline pilot talk—William Heyen (who initially believed what he watched that morning on TV was a hoax from Orson Welles) sent out a request for writing “on the origins and implications of the grief and anger and dread now engulfing us.” Soon the anthology “September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond” appeared with over one hundred articles, essays, or poems by some of our nation’s most renowned writers.
That same year editor Ulrich Baer’s “110 Stories: New York Writes After September 11” was also published, consisting of 110 short stories, poems, and essays featuring, like Heyen’s collection, work by well-known writers as well as many yet to receive their deserved recognition. Content of these anthologies vary both in quality and theme; most of the famous writers contributed personal recollections (“Where I was when…”) or else philosophical/cultural abstractions. But each collection has many deeply-felt expressions of both personal and communal loss, and often by those writers yet to receive much attention.
Also in 2002 “Poetry After 9/11: An Anthology of New York Poets” appeared, edited by Dennis Loy Johnson and Valerie Merians. Similarly to the two other anthologies, often those poets unfamiliar to most readers, even poetry readers, have created the most haunting poems. In “The Old Neighborhood” Andrea Carter Brown’s eye settled on those many people with small street-corner businesses near the Trade Center who survived that day with their lives but not their livelihood. “Where is the man who sold the best jelly donuts and coffee” and the “two brothers who arrived in time for lunch hour with hot and cold heroes where Liberty dead ends at the Hudson?” she wrote. “Where were the farmers from Cape May, the couple selling Golden Books, the Mr. Softee who parked near Trinity Church? I know none of their names, but I can see their faces clear, as I still see everything from that day as I ride away from the place we once shared. Where are they now?”
In 2002 we heard Springsteen’s remorseful, redemptive “The Rising,” and like many of his songs it tells stories about ordinary people, only these people’s loved ones never returned home. “I need you near,” he writes from the heart of a fireman’s wife, “but love and duty called you someplace higher / Somewhere up the stairs into the fire.” And only a year after filmmaker Jules Naudet entered the burning North Tower with his camera rolling, the extraordinary documentary “9/11” by Jules and his brother Gedeon and James Hanlon appeared, four years before Oliver Stone’s “World Trade Center,” with its stunning special effects and true story of survival.
To commemorate the first year of 9/11, our nation’s most popular and acclaimed living poet wrote a haunting piece with the unsettling title “The Names” which he first recited at a special session of the United States Congress. In the poem, Billy Collins “walked out barefoot / Among thousands of flowers / Heavy with dew like the eyes of tears, / And each had a name / Fiori inscribed on a yellow petal / Then Gonzalez and Han, Ishikawa and Jenkins. / Names written in the air / And stitched into the cloth of the day. / A name under a photograph taped to a mailbox. / Monogram on a torn shirt, / I see you spelled out on storefront windows / And on the bright unfurled awnings of this city…. So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.”
Also in 2002, David Halberstam’s “Firehouse,” an elegant testament that follows Engine 40, Ladder 25, right down the block from his apartment on the West Side. Of the company’s thirteen men, only one survived the day. As Frank McCourt said of this book, “If you have tears, prepare to shed them.” One young firefighter had a dentist appointment that morning and his good friend covered for him for his last half-hour. That’s when the first plane hit; the friend who came in early never made it home.
Novelists took longer to recreate even a portion of that day, to forge from those astounding events a palatable, tangible story. But as early as 2004 novelist Irene Marcuse writes in “Under the Manhattan Bridge” what so many of us New Yorkers had felt for years, that “there were many lost spirits floating around us…after the planes hit, when people on fire fell from above” and “souls set wrenchingly free… drift[ed] across the river in a constant plume of smoke and ash.”
New York’s favorite writer Pete Hamill finished one of my favorite novels, “Forever,” on September 10, 2001, “But then everything changed,” he said, and “I need[ed] to write more.” Three years later he published his panoramic story of Cormac O’Connor, who has both the gift and curse of immortality provided he never leaves Manhattan. For two hundred and sixty years we’re with him on this island, and after the Towers fall, “rising above them all, in the dense dry powdery heart of the Cloud, he can hear the meshed voices…calling from the unburied past, from the injured earth….A chorus. Symphonic and soaring, the voices of the New York Gotterdammurung.”
In 2005 appeared a most extraordinary work of non-fiction about that day, a brilliant, vast overview written by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn entitled “102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers.” It reads like a thriller despite that we know how it ends: from the first plane hitting the North Tower until its fall took only 102 minutes. A Times bestseller and National Book Award Finalist, this is one of the most powerful books I’ve ever read.
2005 was also when Jonathan Safran Foer’s imaginative, heart-wrenching novel “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” was released. In it we follow a nine-year-old boy through the city in search of a connection to his father who died in the Towers. The novel ends with the boy imagining that terrible day in reverse, and the last fourteen pages are photographs of someone falling from the Tower only they too are arranged in reverse, so the person appears not to be falling but ascending back into the Tower.
“After the Fall” is the title poem from the 2007 collection of the same name by Greenwich Village poet Ed Fields. At over 200 lines, it does the very thing it longs not to do: “I don’t want to think of / those inside the planes,” he writes, “I don’t want to think of those trapped on the high floors…. I don’t want any of this to happen/ but it plays over and over again.”
Don DeLillo’s novel “Falling Man,” published in 2007, explores the consequences on one man’s life after he walks out of the smoke and ash; ”the clearest vision yet,” wrote Malcolm Jones in Newsweek, ”of what it felt like to live through that day.” The novel begins, “It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night….The roar was still in the air, the buckling rumble of the fall.”
A character in David Levithan’s “Love is the Higher Law” (2009) is relieved and deeply grateful that the two lines of poetry emblazoned along the esplanade of the World Financial Center–one line by Whitman, the other Frank O’Hara — survived the destruction.
As more time passes, as historical perspectives adjust and refocus, more thorough collections have appeared as well as a study of that writing; last May University of Essex professor Richard Gray, considered Europe’s leading scholar on American literature, published “After the Fall: American Literature Since 9/11,” the first detailed analysis of what has been written about that day and the cultural and international effect it has had on the United States. What was undeniably clear was that, for many writers –in the scope of such colossal events — language had failed them despite the enormous amount of fine writing that has emerged in the past decade.
Although we miss the towers, in truth most of us at first didn’t like them: “When they went up,” poet David Lehman admits, “I talked them down.” Lacking the stunning opulence of the Chrysler Building or the elegant symmetry of the Empire State Building, merely a glass and aluminum rectangle, they represented for some of us the worst in modern architecture. Worse yet, there were two of them. But in time we accepted them, first with Philippe Petit’s magical 45 minute walk that August morning in 1974, then later we loved them: how, day or night, the city, the river, and the sky were reflected in their sparkling exteriors, how tall and stately they were, and, as with the Empire State Building uptown, how the Twin Towers became for us a way to get our bearings and, from Newark Airport, a beckoning landmark.
Most us are unable to express the effect that day had — and continues to have — on our unassuming, seemingly protected lives, but a few gifted writers could, and they fulfilled the writer’s primary task of giving utterance to the deepest emotions of the heart.
